About a week or so ago I started looking around at some baby things. Items to buy, things to do, ways to swaddle etc…

Never do this.

Not without some sort of parameters. I didn’t have any and it only took a few minutes for me to nearly fall over the edge into a swirling abyss that contained the 200 different styles of burp rags, several different bottles of all shapes and sizes, and holy shit did you know there are multiple ways to swaddle your baby?

So I backed off. This is one of those times my logical brain was able to sense my teetering on the edge and pull me back. It reminded me that I’ve done this before. Not for a baby obviously, but for my motorcycles.

Stick with me here. Let’s say you want a new set of handlebars. If you just look for handlebars, you’re gonna get too many results for your brain to even parse. So what do you do? You narrow it down.

– You narrow it down to bars that only work for your bike.
– You narrow it down to the particular brands you want.
– You narrow down the style, width, slope, and height

When I do this when I shop for bars, it narrows my choices down from hundreds to a select few. From there it’s easier to compare my final choices to see which one sticks out. And this same concept works for baby stuff as well. Without a gameplan, trying to find the perfect stroller/car seat/baby item is very much like trying to find a needle in a field of haystacks. Back to the kid, when I realized my problem was I just needed to narrow down the options, things got easy. I relaxed and got things handled in short order. And then I realized I gotta be more relaxed overall.

But it’s not easy. I’ve said before that I haven’t been stressed about the kid, that I’m anxious instead. And that’s true. But even in the middle of anxiousness and impatience, there’s room to relax. Odds are this will be the only kid we’ll ever have. Which is fine, but we missed the first six months. I wanna remember things from the moment we found out. I wanna remember it all. And I can’t do that if I’m spending 2 hours deciding on the wheel size of a stroller.

And now, with a few exceptions, we’re at the point where we’re pretty much just waiting on Six to arrive. I’ve gone from doing the things I can do, like buying furniture, or reorganizing the house or getting Six’s room ready to go, to not really having all that much to do. So now I have time on my hands combined with the anxiousness. This is where things can creep in that don’t need to be there:

– What kind of Dad am I going to be? (Obviously a cool Biker Dad, but what else? )
– What if my kids hates tacos?
– What if he inherits my inability to belch at will? (It’s awful.)
– How long after the kid is born until we get to sleep again?

I let those kinds of questions play for a while because I think it’s healthy to entertain them rather than shut them out. But then I roll over or get up out of my chair, take a deep breath, relax, and move on.

It’s slow, but I’m learning.